Discontinuation of Custom Items

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David B
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Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:19 pm

Discontinuation of Custom Items

Post by David B »

It has been a little under two years since we released our distribution of Custom Items, which allows for administrators of Bukkit and Spigot-based Minecraft servers to add custom item recipes to their servers. Unfortunately, the project has not really taken off within that time as we had hoped, achieving only 515 downloads. To put that into perspective, our distribution of Herobrine has been downloaded over 10,000 times since March of 2015. Because Custom Items has not proven itself to be desirable, the decision has been made to discontinue it.

Why?
As was already mentioned, Custom Items has not been as popular as we had hoped it would be. Since I maintain this website and the projects on it independently, and I have increasingly less free time, I have to eliminate "dead weight" projects so that I have time to work on new projects as well as maintain older projects that are more popular. Unfortunately, Custom Items does not have the user base to make it worth putting any additional effort into it, so the decision to discontinue it was made.

How does this discontinuation affect me?
Unless you are an administrator of a Bukkit or Spigot-based Minecraft server, this discontinuation does not affect you. For those of you who do use the plugin though, here is what you can expect to see change immediately following the release of this announcement.
  • All development on Custom Items has stopped. This means that any pull requests that are made to the Custom Items repository will be rejected.
  • Support for Custom Items will no longer be provided. All forums related to Custom Items will be removed shortly after this post is made, and any private messages that I receive asking for assistance following the publishing of this post will be informed of the discontinuation of Custom Items.
  • The Custom Items API page will be removed from the website to discourage its use in any new plugins.
  • The page explaining how to use the Custom Items Internal Bug Reporting feature will be removed, and all versions of Custom Items that support Internal Bug Reporting will be marked as unsupported. This will disable Internal Bug Reporting for all versions of Custom Items.
  • An alert will be added to the Custom Items Changelog and Download pages that state that the project has been discontinued.

After the initial changes that are listed above, there will be several additional changes within the coming weeks.
  • The Custom Items Git repository will remain online here until Saturday, September 30, 2017. After that time, the repository will be removed. Anyone who wishes to acquire a copy of the repository before it is removed must do so before then.
  • The Custom Items pages that were not removed immediately following the announcement will be removed from the site on Saturday, October 7, 2017. This will include download links, so anyone who wishes to download the plugin before it is removed must do so before then.
  • The Internal Bug Reporting system for Custom Items will be shut down on Saturday, October 7, 2017. Internal Bug Reporting will be disabled for all Custom Items versions shortly after this post is made, but the server-side aspects of the system will remain in place. This is so that for a short time after support is disabled, plugins will report that they are no longer supported instead of saying that they could not communicate with the server, as they will do once the system is shut down on October 7.
  • Support for Custom Items will be removed from the Herobrine plugin as part of the next version's release. This will discourage the continued use of Custom Items on servers that also use Herobrine.
    • December 30, 2017 Update: As of the release of Herobrine v1.7.2, support for Custom Items has been removed.

Can I still use Custom Items on my server?
The answer to this is technically yes, however it is not recommended. With each new version of Minecraft that is released, plugin developers must test their plugins to ensure that they still work as expected. Because Custom Items is no longer supported, it will no longer receive this sort of testing from me, and therefore, cannot be relied upon to work properly with future releases, and even if it does work, you will not receive support if you run in to a problem. Basically, the answer comes down to "yes you can, but you do so at your own risk."

I have a question concerning the discontinuation.
If you have any questions concerning the discontinuation of Custom Items, please send me a private message. Please note that I am no longer supporting Custom Items, so any questions that are asked about Custom Items must pertain to its discontinuation.

September 30, 2017 Update: The Custom Items repository has now been removed.

October 14, 2017 Update: All Custom Items-related pages and downloads have now been removed from the website. Additionally, the server-side aspects of the Custom Items Internal Bug Reporting utility have been removed. This means that any attempts to submit a report will now fail with a "failed to connect to server" error.
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